Erica Jong: How To Save Your Own Life

“Sometimes I think I could tell the story of my life through the scars that mark my body. I could write a whole novel in which the heroine, standing naked before the mirror of her memory, enumerated the scars up and down the length of her body, and for eah scar told the story of how it came to mark her flesh, the pain she suffered, whome she suffered that pain with, what healing was attempted and by whom. Each chapter heading would name the scar, and each chapter would begin with a recounting of the accident that “caused” the scar. Except that the reader would instantly become aware that the “cause” was much deeper than mere accident.
I would tell of the opalescent, crescent-moon-shaped scar on my right knee, made by a equally opalescent shell fragment on the beach at Fire Island the summer I was eight, I would tell how I sank to my eager knees in the sand, not feeling the shell pierce through the moony white bone until I stood and bright-red arterial blood spurted out onto the white sand. I would tell of the six pale stitches on my left palm, made by a huge bread knife the summer I was fifteen, mserably unhappy with my job as a kitchen maid and waitress at Camp Merryhill, and wanting a reason to stop slicing sandwiches so I could languish in the infirmary, read Dickens and feel like an oprhan along with Pip and Oliver Twist. I would tell of the twelve-slice-high stack of uncut peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and hw I suddenly brought my palm down on the blade I had unwittingly pointed toward the ceiling, slicing open my own white flesh instead of the spongy white flesh of the bread. I would tell of the strange fibrous lump in my backside, made by the quarts of blood released into the tissue of my back and thighs when I was deliberately given a too-spirited horse at the Ft. Sam Houston Riding Club and was later thrown spine first onto an outcropping of rock. I would tell how I was lucky enough to lose only blood rather than the use of my legs, how I landed on my ass rather than my spine, how my guardian angel spared me paralysis, how i was taken to the army hospital, and suddenly, in the middle of 1966, realized that a whole secret war was being fought in Vietnam as I passed my three weeks in the hsopital among baby-faced quadruple amputees and napalmed children from Vietnam.
Then I would go back in time more than thirty years and tell of the tiny hole in my neck, created in my mother's womb, the disturbing remains of some mysterious prenatal event whose traces remain to this day. I would tell of the three stitches above my left eye, made when I catapulted over the cord of my electric typewriter in one of those fits of despair abut writing which are as much a part of the writer's trade as the typewriter itself. I would save for last that almost imperceptible swelling in my left shin, the remains of my fractured tibia, snapped on the icy slopes in Zu:rs in 1967, when Bennett was so deeply involved with Penny that he hated having to go on vacation with me and consequently bullied me into skiing on slopes which he knew were icy and anyway too difficult for me to handle.
Oh I could tell the story of my marriage to Bbennet throught the accidents we had together. Interestingly enough, I was always the one who got hurt. And he – who felt like a perpetual victim of the world's injustices and therefore justified in committing any cruelty – was always angry at me for getting hurt. But one accident will have to do, will have to serve for all the rest.” (102-103)

How To Save Your Own Life: Signet, New York, 1977.